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As MIT psychologist G. E. Zuriff observed later in an essay for the Public Interest, "It is not difficult to see how these ideas would antagonize not only Dr. Laura [Schlessinger] but the public at large." For although the incendiary potential of asking people to give pedophilia a second look may or may not have been grasped by the APA authorities who accepted the article for publication, no such ambiguity marked the reaction of the lay public. Most people were made aware of "Meta-Analytic" in March 1999, when Schlessinger devoted the first of two radio talks to attacking the article, and their own livid view of the matter was made known in the course of a multi-dimensional public uproar that took months to die down. The denouement was a series of unusual events, including a public castigation of the American Psychological Association by majority whip Tom DeLay; a House vote to condemn the "Meta-Analytic" essay itself (355-0, with 13 abstentions); and a highly unusual public rejection by the APA of the piece's conclusions, along with a promise to acquire an independent evaluation of the article.

In retrospect, there were two significant and little-noticed facts in all this. One was not so much the schism that this controversy revealed between elite-therapeutic and popular thinking about pedophilia, but rather that the schism itself had gone unnoticed for so long. For shocking though it may have been to the general public, "Meta-Analytic" was in fact only the latest in a very long series of professional attempts to revise therapeutic conceptions of boy pedophilia, attempts of which most lay readers remain quite ignorant.

More by Mary Eberstadt

Professionals in the field know better. Fifteen years ago, for example, in his careful research volume "Child Sexual Abuse," noted authority David Finkelhor was already drawing attention to the "body of opinion and research [that] has emerged in recent years which is trying hard to vindicate homosexual pedophilia." To read Finkelhor's sources on the subject--or, for that matter, to read the notes in the heavily sourced "Meta-Analytic" itself--is to see exactly what he means. In their call to redefine "abuse" as "contact," for example, Rind, Bauserman, and Tromovitch were merely resurrecting research and conceptual work stretching back over two decades; similarly, their distinctions between boys' and girls' supposed experiences of abuse have a pedigree that begins with Kinsey and branches out dramatically in professional publications of the last 25 years. The authors of "Meta-Analytic" may have made their points boldly enough to get noticed; but that is the only academic novelty to which they could truly lay claim. The real news about the normalization of pedophilia displayed in "Meta-Analytic" was that nothing about it was conceptually new.

The second peculiarity of the outrage over "Meta-Analytic," which also went unnoticed at the time, was that it was not, in fact, universally shared. The notorious North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), predictably enough, cheered the study as "good news." Less explicable was the reaction within the gay press, which not only failed to distance its movement from the study, but went on to excoriate the APA's critics (particularly Laura Schlessinger). This was the same approach taken, independently, by at least two mainstream--and relatively conservative--gay journalists.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, prominent author and activist Andrew Sullivan complained about the "sour reception" that had greeted the study. After all, he wrote, Rind et al. had found that "lasting psychological trauma among adult survivors of abuse, particularly for men, was much less than feared." This, according to Sullivan, should be "a reason for relief." Instead, and what he evidently found disagreeable, "outraged members of the religious right accused the APA of tolerating pedophilia" and "launched a crusade to punish the organization." He concluded sarcastically: "That'll teach them to look on the bright side."

Another writer outraged over the outrage about "Meta-Analytic" was respected reporter and political analyst Jonathan Rauch. In his commentary on the controversy published in the National Journal, Rauch roundly defended the study. It was the critics of the "Meta-Analytic" piece, Rauch wrote, who were "turning out stomach-churning stuff." The vote in Congress--as opposed, say, to what Rind et al. had written--was "faintly sinister." Like the authors of the piece itself, Rauch advocated that, in the name of "science," researchers should "abandon the current custom of referring to all adult sexual encounters with minors, regardless of the circumstances, as 'child sexual abuse,'" because they could "perform finer-grained analyses if they used 'abuse' to denigrate injurious or unwilling encounters. Other encounters," Rauch echoed, "could be called 'adult-child sex' or 'adult-adolescent sex.'"

To his credit, Rauch did report that "in 1989, when he was 23 and just out of college, Bauserman [one of the Meta-Analytic authors] published a cross-cultural comparison of attitudes toward man-boy sexual relations in a Dutch journal called Paidika." This journal, in Rauch's description, "had taken pro-pedophilia stands"--something which he admitted "raises red flags."

But at the same time Rauch, like Sullivan, avoided the real issue at hand--that "Meta-Analytic" quite obviously aimed at de-stigmatizing boy pedophilia itself. Even more startling, though, was his bland depiction of Paidika. This is not exactly a journal in which pro-pedophile ideas have somehow surfaced accidentally. It is a publication dedicated to the phenomenon of "boy-loving," the most prominent such "scholarly journal" in the world, whose longtime editor, the late Edward Brongersma, was a convicted pedophile as well as the author of a two-volume pedophile classic, "Loving Boys." (To describe this as a journal which "had taken pro-pedophilia stands" is akin to describing The Weekly Standard as a magazine where conservative arguments have reportedly appeared.) And, of course, the qualifier "23 and just out of college" served to soften Bauserman's earlier appearance in Paidika, suggesting it was an excess of youth.

Both Sullivan and Rauch are not only prominent gay journalists but also leading proponents of the worldview to which the gay rights movement owes much of its recent and stunning political success--the argument that, as Sullivan's "Virtually Normal" puts it, "homosexuals . . . have the equivalent emotional needs and temptations of heterosexuals." Both writers are also members of the Independent Gay Forum, an institution aimed at "forging a mainstream identity"; and both have frequently broken ranks with the leftists and radicals who dominate gay activism. That two such mainstream authors should mock the public outcry against that APA article illustrates something noteworthy: that in place of a social consensus against pedophilia per se, a separate option--call it anti-anti-pedophilia--appears to have taken root. According to that view, the problem is less sex with minors than the people who declare themselves against it--Dr. Laura fans, congressmen, dissident therapists, religious types, and anyone else who does not grasp the necessity of putting words like "child sexual abuse" in quotes.

II

In some of the clinical and therapeutic literature on pedophilia, it has become customary to distinguish between "ephebophilia," or sexual attraction to prepubescent children and teenagers, and "pedophilia" proper, meaning attraction to prepubescent children. Both forms are exhibited more than occasionally in another part of the written world, namely gay fiction. "Fiction" here emphatically does not mean pornography as such, but the kind of literature authored by self-consciously gay writers, published by reputable houses, and reviewed respectfully in the mainstream press. Again, it must be emphasized that numerous gay authors of note do not positively portray sex between adults and minors, and ipso facto are not part of this discussion.

Plenty of authors do cross the line, though. "Gay fiction," Philip Guichard complained in an article for the Village Voice last summer, "is rich with idyllic accounts of 'intergenerational relationships,' as such affairs are respectfully called these days." Over four years ago, "Pedophilia Chic" quoted passages from the works of several acclaimed authors--including Edmund White, the late Paul Monette, and Larry Kramer--which frankly and often sympathetically portrayed men seeking and having sex with underage boys. Today there are many more such examples to be found in gay fiction, all verifiable by a trip to the local chain bookstore.

Last year, for example, St. Martins Press published a novel called "The Coming Storm" by Paul Russell, a professor of English at Vassar and the author of three previously well-received works of fiction. The drama of this tale revolves around something that remains an imprisonable offense in almost every state--a sexual "affair" between a troubled 15-year-old boy (Noah) and his 25-year-old gay boarding school teacher (Tracy). (The age of 15, incidentally, is no definitive limit in Russell's narrative. In the course of the book, Tracy also fantasizes about 14-year-old boys.)

"The Coming Storm" became the object of effusive praise by award-winning reviewer Dennis Drabelle in the Washington Post Book World (August 15, 1999). "The Coming Storm," Drabelle enthused, "takes off from a sensational subject--forbidden sexuality--to arrive at unexpected heights and subtleties." It "persuades the reader" that "the sexual relationship between Noah and Tracy is not only not harmful to either but a boon to the precocious junior partner, who becomes a better, more engaged student after the affair gets under way." What is "troublesome" about the book, according to Drabelle, is not that anyone is "corrupted" by what happens ("no one is"), but that "it is apt to be stereotyped, not least by the legal system that makes it a crime [emphasis added]."

This cheerleading for the sexual molestation of teenagers in the Sunday pages of one of the country's major newspapers did not pass without comment. One reader berated Drabelle in the letters column for "strongly implying that child abuse, when it takes place between two males, should no longer be viewed by the public as either a social offense or a crime."3 Yet as even a partial survey of related literature shows, what is truly anomalous about this case--of a mainstream reviewer in a mainstream family newspaper ratifying sex between grown men and boys--was that anyone bothered to be bothered about it at all. Other writers, including prominent writers among them, have gone further still, and with even less consequence.

Consider David Leavitt, one of the best known of contemporary gay authors, whose numerous novels and short stories, among them "The Lost Language of Cranes" and, most recently, "Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing," are routinely reviewed in the better journals and magazines. In fact, it would be hard to think of a gay fiction writer more consistently represented in mainstream publishing.

For that reason, it is all the more surprising to read what this ostensibly mainstream author chose to write in his introduction to the equally mainstream "Penguin Book of International Gay Writing" (1995, edited by Mark Mitchell). There, in the course of describing what the anthology includes, Leavitt notes matter-of-factly that "Another 'forbidden' topic from which European writers seem less likely to shrink is the love of older men for young boys." He then draws attention to one particular book excerpted in the volume, "When Jonathan Died," by Tony Duvert. "The coolly assured narrative" of this work, Leavitt informs, "compels the reader to imagine the world from a perspective he might ordinarily condemn." Duvert, writes Leavitt, "offers us a homosexual Lolita--one in which the child is seducer as much as seduced."

The object of this praise by one of America's leading gay novelists, appearing in one of publishing's most prestigious book series, is the tale of a man and boy who are living together in Italy. The scene selected is sexually graphic. And the age of this child, whom Leavitt considers "seducer as much as seduced"? He is--page 427 in the hard cover edition--"hardly seven."

Another seemingly representative collection of gay literature, this one on the shelf at Barnes & Noble and also apparently selling without comment, is "The Gay Canon: Great Books Every Gay Man Should Read," an Anchor Book published by Doubleday in 1998. Its editor/author, Robert Drake, is a novelist and editor of other anthologies who has won the Lambda Literary Award. Like the Penguin anthology edited by Leavitt, Drake's book too strives for canonical status, aspiring to offer a roadmap to the most important texts of gay history.

As it turns out, several of the texts that editor Drake thought worth including feature scenes of man-boy sex--again, what most of the rest of the public calls abuse or molestation. One work is something called "The Carnivorous Lamb" by Agustin Gomez-Arcos, described as a book about an incestuous relationship between a boy and his older brother (to Drake, "the best, most complex yet satisfying novel of filial love ever written"). Another text, this one by writer Matthew Stadler--described as the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship for his first novel--is called "The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee." This book, says editor Drake, "is an operatic adventure into the realms of love, personality, ambition and art . . . a pure joy to read." Its protagonist is "a pedophile's dream: the mind of a man in the body of a boy." Drake also excerpts and discusses William S. Burroughs's nightmarish "The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead," the pederastic violence of which defies description. Yet this work, according to Drake, "tears straight to the heart of one of the greatest sources, community-wide, of 1990s gay angst: What to do with men who love boys?"4

Still another example of how standards are being lowered by a major publisher and respected writer--this one from academia and available at Borders--is "A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition," published in 1998 by Yale University Press. This book, "the first full-scale account of gay male literature, across cultures, languages and from ancient times to the present," is authored by Gregory Woods, described on the jacket as "the foremost gay poet working in Britain today." It includes a longish chapter on "Boys and Boyhood" which is a seemingly definitive account of pro-pedophile literary works, ranging over texts from the platonic "Death in Venice" to the noir likes of the aforementioned Tony Duvert. Nothing is questioned, much less condemned, in the course of Woods's account of these works. The only moral ambiguity that occurs to him concerns not the boy but the man in the equation. Woods concludes: "By playing [i.e., having sex] with boys, the man remains boyish. Whether you regard this as a way of retreating from life or, on the contrary, as a way of engaging with it at its most honest and least corrupted level, depends on which writer you consult at any given time [emphasis added]."